The Press: Out on a Limb with the Midi

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agree that the traditional fashion industry is being challenged by the small boutiques and the creative individuals who run them. But that does not deter him from his old-fashioned power play with the midi.

A lot of John Fairchild's uncles and cousins are shocked at his arrogance, but in some trade-journal heaven his grandfather Edmund must be bursting with pride. A Chicago pushcart peddler, Edmund bought an interest in a men's-wear trade paper in 1890 and began distributing it as he made his rounds. That was the beginning of a staid, relatively prosperous family publishing empire that now includes Daily News Record (which covers the men's clothing industry), Electronic News, Footwear News, Home Furnishings Daily, Metalworking News, Supermarket News, Men's Wear magazine and a book division. The total circulation of the eight journals is nearly 400,000.

College Dropout

Born in 1927, John attended Kent prep school in Connecticut and started at Princeton in 1946. Fairchild recalls that he had ideas then about becoming a physician or scientist, but "I was just simply hopeless in math, simply gross with figures." He dropped out of college after his freshman year and joined the Army, serving in the Pentagon as a speechwriter and an occasional model for recruiting posters.

By then his father had become president of Fairchild, and John no longer had even vague doubts that his future lay with the family venture. He went back to Princeton for a bachelor's degree in general humanities and back to WWD for summer jobs. Between his junior and senior years, he was sent to help out in Fairchild Publications' Paris bureau. That summer, he also met Jill Lipsky, the soft-spoken daughter of a Russian father and English mother, whom he married a year later, after his graduation from Princeton and hers from Vassar.

Shortly after that, Fairchild took his first full-time job with WWD as a reporter covering the New York retail field. His aggressive, damn-the-consequences (and sometimes damn-the-advertiser) approach to news quickly stamped him as more than a boss's son out for an easy ride up the corporate ladder. "I found I really got a terrific kick out of getting things first, scoops on things like Ohrbach's moving farther uptown, and prying out things you weren't supposed to know, like stores' profit figures." "From the moment he started," his father says, "he stirred things up."

In 1954, his father put him in charge of the Paris bureau, and things really began stirring. Covering his first fashion shows in Paris, Fairchild found himself seated at the back of the room and generally ignored in favor of the ladies from Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and the New York Times. "I vowed then," he recalls, "to change that, to make them all sit up and take notice of me and Women's Wear Daily."

Sit up they did. Fairchild began panning collections unmercifully, breaking release dates on sketches of clothes, cultivating couturiers' underlings as tipsters, and reporting in juicy (though often unchecked) detail the gossip of buyers overheard in the bar of the Ritz Hotel. In other fields of journalism, even old-fashioned police reporting, such antics might result in a punch on the nose or at least ostracism. But in the bitchy, fearful world of fashion, where a snub is worse